Hostname: page-component-7b9c58cd5d-bslzr Total loading time: 0.001 Render date: 2025-03-15T13:31:00.497Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Nuclear schizophrenic symptoms as a window on the relationship between thought and speech

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2018

Tim J. Crow
Tim J. Crow*
Affiliation:
Prince of Wales International Centre, University Department of Psychiatry, Warneford Hospital, Oxford OX3 7JX. E-mail: tim.crow@psychiatry.ox.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Background

Symptoms of schizophrenia known as nuclear’ or ‘first-rank’ are found in all populations. The genetic variation that gives rise to them must be as old as modern Homo sapiens.

Method

The hypothesis was formulated that language evolved, under constraints on callosal transmission, by a process of hemispheric specialisation. One component, the phonological output sequence, became localised to the dominant hemisphere whereas its associations (the signifieds) were lateralised in part to the non-dominant hemisphere. Concepts (‘thoughts’) are translated through a bi-hemispheric interaction into phonemes (‘speech’) by the speaker in frontal association areas, and decoded back into concepts (‘meanings’) by the hearer in occipito-temporo-parietal association areas.

Results

The first-rank symptoms demonstrate that an integral component is a system of ‘indexicality’ that distinguishes those phonemic signals generated by the hearer, from his own thoughts, and from signals that he receives from an interlocutor.

Conclusions

Language, as Buehler proposed, is cast in a coordinate system orientated at its origin, in the dominant hemisphere, to the self of the speaker. Thus conceived, the phenomena of the illness called schizophrenia are key to the neural organisation of the human characteristic of language.

Type
Papers
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 173 , Issue 4 , October 1998 , pp. 303 - 309
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 The Royal College of Psychiatrists 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Annett, M. (1985) Left, Right. Hand and Brain: The Right Shift Theory. London: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Annett, M. (1995) The right shift theory of a genetic balanced polymorphism for cerebral dominance and cognitive processing. Current Psychology of Cognition, 14, 427–480.Google Scholar
Barrett, R. J. (1997) Kurt Schneider in Borneo: Do First Rank Symptoms of Schizophrenia Apply to The Iban? pp. 84–85. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association.Google Scholar
Berner, P., Gabriel, E., Katschnig, H., et al (1992) Diagnostic Criteria for Functional Psychoses (2nd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bickerton, D. (1995) Language and Human Behavior. Seattle, WA: University of Washington.Google Scholar
Bleuler, E. (1950) Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias (translated Zinkin, J.). New York: International University Press.Google Scholar
Broca, P. (1861) Remarques sur la siegé de la faculté du langue, bulletin de las Société Anatomique de Paris, 6, 330–357.Google Scholar
Buehler, K. (1934) Sprachtheorie. Translated (1990) by D. W Goodwin as Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1985) Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1995) The Minimalist Program. Hong Kong: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cook, N. D. (1984) Callosal inhibition: the key to the brain code, behavioural Science, 29, 98–110.Google Scholar
Crow, T. J. (1986) The continuum of psychosis and its implication for the structure of the gene, british Journal of Psychiatry, 149, 419–429.Google Scholar
Crow, T. J. (1990) Temporal lobe asymmetries as the key to the etiology of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia bulletin, 16, 433–443.Google Scholar
Crow, T. J. (1993) Sexual selection, Machiavellian intelligence and the origins of psychosis. Lancet, 342, 594–598.Google Scholar
Crow, T. J. (1994) The demise of the Kraepelinian binary system as a prelude to genetic advance. In Genetic Approaches to Mental Disorders (eds Gershon, E. S. & Cloninger, C. R.), pp. 163–192. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press.Google Scholar
Crow, T. J. (1995) A continuum of psychosis, one human gene and not much else – the case for homogeneity. Schizophrenia Research, 17, 135–145.Google Scholar
Crow, T. J. (1997a) Is schizophrenia the price that Homo sapiens pays for language? Schizophrenia Research, 28, 127–141.Google Scholar
Crow, T. J. (1997b) Schizophrenia as failure of hemispheric dominance for language. Trends in Neurosciences, 20, 339–343.Google ScholarPubMed
Crow, T. J. (1998) Precursors of psychosis as pointers to the Homo sopiens-specific mate recognition system of language, british Journal of Psychiatry, 172, 289–290.Google Scholar
Crow, T. J., Done, D. J. & Sacker, A. (1995) Childhood precursors of psychosis as clues to its evolutionary origins. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 245, 61–69.Google Scholar
Dax, M. (1865) Lésions de la moitié gauche de l'éncephale coincident avec l'oubli des signes de la pensée. Gazette Hebdomadal de Médecine et Chirurgie, 11, 259–260.Google Scholar
de Saussure, F. (1916) Course in General Linguistics. (Translated by Harris, R. 1983 and published by Open Court, Illinois). Paris: Payot.Google Scholar
Eldredge, N. & Gould, S. J. (1972) Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism. In Models in Paleobiology (ed. Schopf, T. M.), pp. 82–115. San Francisco, CA: Freeman Cooper.Google Scholar
Endicott, J., Nee, J., Fieiss, J., et al (1982) Diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia: reliabilities and agreement between systems. Archives of General Psychiatry, 39, 884–889.Google Scholar
Gathercole, S. E. & Baddeley, A. D. (1993) Working Memory and Language. Hove: Earlbaum.Google Scholar
Hurford, J. R. (1992) An approach to the phytogeny of the language faculty. In The Evolution of Human Languages (eds Hawkins, J. A. & Gell-Man, M.), pp. 273–303. Reading: Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
Jablensky, A., Sartorius, N., Ernberg, G., et al (1992) Schizophrenia: manifestations, incidence and course in different cultures. A World Health Organization Ten Country Study. Psychological Medicine, 22 (suppl. 20), 1–97 Google Scholar
Kraepelin, E. (1899) Psychiatrie. Ein Lehrbuch für Studierende und Arzte (6th edn). Leipzig: J. A. Barth.Google Scholar
Kraepelin, E. (1920) Die Erscheinungsformen des Irreseins (translated by H. Marshall as: Patterns of mental disorder. In Themes and Variations in European Psychiatry. eds Hirsch, S. R. & Shepherd, M. Wright, Bristol, pp. 730, 1974). Zeitschrift Gesamte Neurologie Psychiatrie, 62, 1–29.Google Scholar
Lakoff, R. (1968) Abstract Syntax and Latin Complementation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lyons, J. (1995) Linguistic Semanvcs: An Introduction. London: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Marshall, J. C. & Newcombe, F. (1966) Syntactic and semantic errors in paralexia. Neuropsychologia, 4, 169–176.Google Scholar
McGrew, W. C. & Marchant, L. F. (1996) On which side of the apes? Ethological study of laterality of hand use. In Great Ape Societies (eds McGrew, W. C., Marchant, L. F. & Nishida, T.), pp. 255–272. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGrew, W. C. & Marchant, L. F. (1997) On the other hand: current issues in and meta-analysis of the behavioral laterality of hand function in nonhuman primates. Yearbook on Physical Anthropology 40, 201–232.Google Scholar
McManus, I. C. (1991) The inheritance of left-handedness. In biological Asymmetry and Handedness. (CIBA Foundation Symposium 162) (eds Bock, Q. R. & Marsh, J.), pp. 251–281. Chichester: Wiley.Google Scholar
Mowry, B. J., Lennon, D. P. & De Felie, C. N. (1994) Diagnosis of schizophrenia in a matched sample of Australian aborigines. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 90, 337–341.Google Scholar
Murphy, J. M. (1976) Psychiatric labelling in a cross-cultural perspective. Science, 191, 1019–1028.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paivio, A. (1991) Dual coding theory: retrospect and current status. Canadian Journal of Psychology 45, 255–287.Google Scholar
Perelle, I. B. & Ehrman, L. (1994) An international study of human handedness: the data, behavior Genetics, 24, 217–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riley, B. P., Rajagopalan, S., Moguid-Carter, M., et al (1996) No evidence for linkage of chromosome 6p markers to schizophrenia in Southern African Bantu-speaking families. Psychiatric Genetics, 6, 41–49.Google Scholar
Ringo, J. L., Doty, R. W., Demeter, S., et al (1994) Time is of the essence: a conjecture that hemispheric specialisation arises from interhemispheric conduction delay. Cerebral Cortex, 4, 331–343.Google Scholar
Ross, J. R. (1970) On declarative sentences. In Readings in English Transformational Grammar (eds Jacobs, R. A. & Rosenbaum, P. S.), pp. 222–272. Waltham, MA: Ginn.Google Scholar
Sadock, J. M. (1974) Towards a Linguistic Theory of Speech Aas. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Sapir, E. (1997) Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt Brace & Jovanovic.Google Scholar
Schneider, K. (1957) Primare und Sekundare Symptome bei der Schziophrenie (translated by H. Marshall as: Primary and secondary symptoms in schizophrenia. In Themes and Variations in European Psychiatry, eds Hirsch, S. R., Shepherd, M. Wright, Bristol, pp 40–44, 1974). Fortsschritte der Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 25, 487–490.Google Scholar
Sims, A.C. (1993) Schizophrenia and the permeability of the self. Neurology, Psychiatry and Brain Research, 1, 133–135.Google Scholar
Steele, J. (1998) Cerebral asymmetry, cognitive laterality, and human evolution. Current Psychology of Cognition, in press.Google Scholar
Wing, J. K., Cooper, J. E. & Sartorius, N. (1974) The Measurement and Classification of Psychiatric Symptoms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Woodward, S. H. (1988) An anatomical model of hemispheric asymmetry. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 10, 68.Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.